Notes for owners · Business growth
Newspaper advertising in Bengaluru: which paper reaches which city
Two cities read two sets of papers here. The English dailies reach the corridor that arrived in the last decade, the Kannada dailies reach the settled one, and the insert by pincode reaches your own street.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 9 min read
Bengaluru reads two sets of newspapers, and they reach two different cities. The English dailies are read in the corridor that filled up in the last fifteen years, in the offices, and by the households that were always English-reading. The Kannada dailies are read by the settled city. The older localities, the trade, the family businesses, and the households where the paper still arrives every morning and is actually read. Choosing between them is the whole decision, and most plans get it wrong by buying whichever paper the owner reads at breakfast.
The titles, and who is holding them
In English, Deccan Herald and The Times of India carry the largest city readerships, with The Hindu and The New Indian Express alongside them. The business dailies circulate through the office corridors and reach a specific reader: the person approving a purchase, not the one making it.
In Kannada, Prajavani and Vijaya Karnataka are the heavyweights in the city. Vijayavani, Kannada Prabha, Udayavani and Samyukta Karnataka are each strong in their own pockets, and considerably stronger outside Bengaluru. Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi and Urdu titles circulate where those communities are concentrated. For a business in Ulsoor, Austin Town, Shivajinagar or parts of Hosur Road, that is worth asking about rather than assuming away.
Ask any title for its Bengaluru city circulation rather than its total. The gap between the two is the first useful thing you will learn, and for the Kannada dailies it is a large gap.
Who still takes a paper, and where
This is the part a national media plan cannot tell you. The morning paper in Bengaluru survives best in owner-occupied households, in the older localities, among readers over forty, and in the trade. Chickpet, Balepet, Avenue Road, Rajajinagar, Malleswaram, Basavanagudi, Jayanagar, Vijayanagar and our own Nagarbhavi side still have the paper coming to the door.
A twenty-six year old renting a flat in Bellandur does not take a newspaper. Neither does the family two floors up. So a display advertisement in an English daily aimed at the tech corridor is reaching the corridor's older, settled, house-owning minority and very little of the rest.
Read that carefully, because it inverts the usual assumption. For reaching young professionals in this city, newspaper is a weak medium and digital is a strong one. For reaching a fifty-five year old in Rajajinagar deciding on a hospital, a gold purchase or a daughter's college, it remains one of the best buys available.
The insert is the local buy
Everything else in a newspaper is bought by edition. The leaflet insert is bought by area, and that makes it the only genuinely hyperlocal thing on the rate card.
You print the leaflet yourself, hand over the quantity, and the title or its delivery network puts it inside the paper in the pincodes you name. A dental clinic in Kengeri, a furniture showroom on Magadi Road or a school in Yelahanka reaches the households within a few kilometres and nobody else. No other print buy stops at a boundary you drew, and that is why the format refuses to die here.
Three things decide whether it works. The quantity has a minimum and the weight has a limit, so check both before you design. Delivery is the real risk, because one agent carries several titles down the same street and a shortfall is invisible. Go and look on the morning it drops, at two or three addresses you pick yourself. And the leaflet has to earn a second look in the three seconds between the paper being opened and the insert hitting the floor.
What to write on the order
Edition, and the sub-edition if the title offers one. The date, the page, and whether the position is fixed or run-of-paper. The size in column centimetres, with the exact artwork dimensions and the safe area. Whether it is display, classified display or a sponsored feature, because those are three different products sold by three different desks. Who supplies the artwork and by when. And a copy of the printed page, or the full paper, as proof.
Positions carry different weight here as everywhere. The front page ear panel, the jacket, page three and the back page are the ones sellers push. A large advertisement buried mid-paper on a Tuesday is not the same buy as a small one on the front page on Sunday, whatever the rate comparison suggests.
Write the advertisement for the paper it sits in
A Kannada advertisement is not an English advertisement translated. The line lengths differ, the tone differs, and a literal translation reads as something produced elsewhere and sent in. Have it written in Kannada by somebody who writes in Kannada, then check it against the English version for what each one promises.
The same applies to what the advertisement asks for. A reader of a Kannada daily in Vijayanagar will phone you. A reader of an English daily in Indiranagar will search for your name and open your website. So the Kannada version needs a number that gets answered and the English version needs the website to be ready. Newspaper advertising covers the booking and the proof side if you would rather not handle it.
When the paper is the wrong buy in this city
When your buyer is under thirty-five and rents. That reader is on a phone, and the money belongs there.
When you are selling to industry. A purchase manager in Peenya or Bommasandra is reached by a call, a marketplace listing or a visit. Reading about you in the paper changes nothing about his supplier list.
When you need it to run for months. Newspaper response arrives on the day and fades within two. That makes it a good medium for an event, an offer, an opening or an admission deadline, and a poor one for building a name slowly.
When the number in the advertisement rings to a phone nobody answers on Sunday morning, which is exactly when a Sunday advertisement gets read.
What to do next
Ask the next twenty people who walk in which paper comes to their house. Write the answers down. Twenty of them, collected over a fortnight, will settle the English-or-Kannada argument better than any readership survey, because they are your customers and not a sample of the city. Then book one insert in the pincodes those answers point to, with a code at the counter. If you want the edition, area and day chosen against your own enquiry history, book the free audit.